Reflections from “Building Co-Curricular Development into Your Residence Life Programme” | CUBO Residence Life Conference 2026
By Heba Khan, Marketing Coordinator, Kinetic
There is a version of residence life that looks like this: a team works hard all year, putting on event after event, responding to whatever students say they want, measuring success by how many people showed up, and starting the following September again with a new cohort who know nothing of what came before. It is exhausting, it is reactive, and it is very common.
Sarah Djuric, Residence Life Manager at the University of Leeds and former Residence Life Steering Group Lead for CUBO College and University Business Officers, came to this session with a different proposition. What if, instead of running a programme, you built a curriculum?
It is a shift in thinking more than a shift in workload. And the session she delivered at the CUBO Residence Life Conference 2026 was one of the most practically useful of the two days.
What a residence curriculum actually is
The term sounds academic, and Sarah acknowledged that. But the idea behind it is straightforward.
A residence curriculum is an intentional, structured framework that defines what you want students to learn and experience during their time in halls, and then organises everything your team does around achieving that. Rather than starting with “what events shall we run this term?” it starts with “what do we want students to be able to do, feel, and understand when they leave us?”
The distinction matters because it changes the relationship between your programme and your outcomes. Without a curriculum, events are the product. With one, events are just one of many strategies in service of something bigger.
Sarah framed it as co-curricular development: intentional learning and skills development that happens outside the classroom, through community living, through leadership opportunities, through the ordinary texture of shared life in halls. Not a replacement for academic study, but something that runs alongside it and genuinely complements it.
“Residence life is growing in a way that we’re not just heads in beds anymore. We’re providing an experience for students and an opportunity to grow and learn.”
That framing carries weight at a time when institutions are under financial pressure and res life teams increasingly need to justify their budgets. A curriculum gives you the language and the evidence to do that.
The waterfall model: what students need to learn, and when
One of the most useful concepts Sarah introduced was the idea of scaffolded, sequenced learning. She described it as a waterfall: knowledge and experience building on itself as students move through their time in halls.
This means thinking about more than just what you want students to know. It means thinking about when they need to know it, and in what order.
A handbook goes out at the start of the year because students need to know the rules before they need to break them. Proactive content about being a considerate neighbour goes out in September, before the inevitable wave of noise complaints arrives in October. Conflict navigation skills are introduced early, before tensions in flats have had time to calcify. By the time a student needs a mediation, the groundwork for having that conversation has already been laid.
“Sometimes a starting point to dealing with a mediation or conflict is just: what’s the name of your flatmate? Get to know a little bit about them. Because when you know someone, you can talk to them. And then you can have challenging conversations when you’re not getting along.”
The scaffolding does not need to be complicated. It just needs to exist, and it needs to be intentional.
Building the framework: from priority to outcome
Sarah walked the room through the key building blocks of a residence curriculum. These are adapted from the work of Kerr and Tweedy, whose research underpins most of what the sector knows about curricular approaches to residential education, and from the practical implementation guides developed by institutions across North America and the UK.
The educational priority is the starting point. It is a one to three-sentence statement about what students will and should learn during their time in halls. It is written from the student’s perspective, not the service’s. It answers the question: What is our mission statement for the people living with us?
Sarah’s advice was to start by imagining your ideal student on move-out day. What have they gained? What can they do that they couldn’t do before? What kind of person are they? The answers to those questions become the raw material for the priority.
The room’s contributions were striking in how much common ground there was across very different institutions. Resilience. The ability to fail and try again. Responsibility to others and to shared spaces. Empathy. Knowing how to navigate conflict without needing someone else to resolve it for you. These kept coming up, regardless of whether a team was at a research-intensive university or a smaller specialist institution.
Learning goals break the educational priority down into three to five pillars: the foundational areas on which the priority is built. Community. Wellbeing. Responsibility. Identity. Integrity. Sarah’s team at Leeds landed on four, arrived at by clustering overlapping ideas like global citizenship, independence and responsibility into a single pillar rather than treating them separately.
Narratives give each learning goal meaning. They are a sentence or two that explain what the goal actually means in the context of your halls. “Community” can mean very different things at different institutions. A narrative makes it specific, consistent, and communicable to students.
Learning outcomes are the measurable, action-oriented statements that sit underneath each goal. They describe what students are expected to know, do or demonstrate as a result of their experience. The keyword is measurable. If you cannot assess it in some way, it is not an outcome yet.
Sarah gave a characteristically honest example from Leeds. One of their outcomes under responsibility is simply that students know how to keep their flat clean. Measurable? Yes. You can look at kitchen inspection data. Meaningful? Absolutely. It sits at the intersection of practical life skills and community responsibility, and it is the kind of thing that, when it goes wrong, generates more conflict and more welfare referrals than almost anything else.
Strategy is not just events
One of the most important slides of the session was the strategy list, which Sarah displayed under the heading “Let’s Talk Strategy.” It covered everything from orientation week and welcome talks to happy flat posters, roommate contracts, flat visits, one-to-one interactions, bulletin boards, newsletters, social media, conducting meetings, sanctions, and welfare conversations.
The point was not that teams should do all of these things. It was that all of these things count as strategies. A newsletter article on managing flatmate conflict is a strategy. A one-to-one check-in that ends with a student being signposted to financial services is a strategy. A flatmate agreement completed at move-in is a strategy. Each one is an opportunity to contribute to a learning outcome if it is designed that way.
“We often try to lure students to places with pizza and then sneak in that learning. But we’re kind of missing the point when we’re doing that. It suggests that the problem is with the students, not the programme.”
The shift Sarah was advocating for is subtle but significant. When you start from clear goals, you can ask the right question: what is the best way to help students achieve this specific thing? Sometimes that is an event. Sometimes it is a poster. Sometimes it is a conversation in a corridor. The strategy follows the outcome, not the other way around.
She was also emphatic about one of her favourite principles: doing more by doing less. Residence life teams are generalists by nature. They know their campus, they know their students, and they know where the expertise already exists. Career services run workshops on CV writing. Financial services offer money management sessions. Counselling teams have content on managing anxiety. The job of a residence life team is not to recreate all of that from scratch. It is to bring it to students, to make it accessible, and to weave it into the fabric of hall life.
“We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We just might need to bring the wheel into our halls.”
The hardest part: knowing if it is working
Assessment was the section Sarah was most candid about. Her team has not nailed it yet, she said. But they are thinking about it intentionally, which is more than most.
The problem with measuring res life impact is that attendance numbers are an easy proxy but a poor measure of learning. Fifty people at an event tell you that fifty people came. It tells you nothing about what they took away, whether their behaviour changed, or whether they feel more confident, more connected, or more capable than they did before.
A curricular approach requires a different kind of evidence. At Leeds, every event is assigned to one of the team’s four learning pillars. A short survey goes out, accessible via QR code, with a coffee draw as an incentive. The questions are simple but specific: Did this help you experience a sense of community? Did you learn something about yourself? Did this develop a skill you needed?
The answers build a picture over time. When the data shows that what the team is trying to instil is actually landing, it makes a compelling case for continued investment. When it does not, it tells you to change your approach.
Other assessment methods Sarah recommended included reflective prompts in one-to-one conversations, tracking conduct data year on year, looking at flatmate agreement completion rates, monitoring whether students are following up on referrals to support services, and asking students directly, at the end of their time in halls, what they feel they gained.
Longitudinal data matters too. Are students in halls making it to graduation at higher rates? Are they engaging in clubs and societies? Are dropout rates lower among students who participated in residence life programming? These are harder to measure but more meaningful, and they are the kinds of outcomes that make the case to senior leadership.
Where to start
Sarah’s advice to the room was refreshingly pragmatic. You do not need to implement a full curriculum from scratch. Pick the element that feels most achievable and start there.
For many teams, that might just be writing an educational priority: one clear statement about what you want students to gain. For others, it might be identifying three learning goals and starting to tag existing activities to them. For a few, it might be mapping out the full waterfall and building a sequenced year plan.
The important thing is intentionality. Knowing why you are doing what you are doing, and being able to articulate it.
For further reading, Sarah recommended two resources in particular. The foundational academic work comes from Kerr and Tweedy, whose research on residential curriculum and curricular approaches to education underpins much of what the sector knows in this area. For a practical step-by-step implementation guide, she pointed to Room Pact, whose book walks teams through the process in a way that is immediately applicable.
The University of Leeds has also published its own residence life framework, available at residencelife.leeds.ac.uk, which offers a real-world example of what a curricular approach looks like in a UK higher education context.
What this means for KxEngage customers
For institutions using KxEngage, the curriculum framework Sarah outlined is directly relevant to how the platform can be used most effectively. KxEngage is built to support meaningful student engagement, not just event promotion. When the events, communications, flat visits, wellbeing check-ins and survey touchpoints logged through the platform are connected to clear learning goals and measurable outcomes, the data they generate becomes genuinely useful evidence of impact.
The shift from “how many students attended?” to “what did students learn?” is exactly the shift a curricular approach demands. And it is a shift that changes what good looks like for a residence life team, and how that team makes the case for its work.
Further reading: Kerr, K.G., and Tweedy, J. (2006). Beyond seat time and student satisfaction: A curricular approach to residential education. About Campus. Room Pact: Developing a Co-Curricular Learning Model. University of Leeds Residence Life Framework: residencelife.leeds.ac.uk
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